Intentional Faith

Readings Meditation Continued…

Advent is a time of waiting, filled with hope, for the One who is to come. When we live in love and act in hope, when we gather again and again at the table to remember what Jesus did and to know that Jesus is with us once again, we are people of Advent hope. We tend to think of the month of December as the Christmas season, and the secular world ironically reinforces that premature celebration, if only to entice us to early and excessive spending. But Advent is a different kind of time, just as we in the church are on a different “calendar” from the rest of the world. Deborah Block claims that this “alternative New Year’s Day affirms time as God’s home and workplace, not as a calendar of accumulating years but as a movement toward fulfillment, not a day for self-improvement resolutions but for community reaffirmation of trust in God’s promises, past, present, and future” (Feasting on the Word Year C, Vol. 1). Our task, then, here, on the near edge of Advent, is to give our lives each day to God’s own dream of compassion and peace, and to persist in living our lives in hope.

If we would stop during this Advent, not Christmas, season, and look around at our communities, where would we see justice and righteousness? How easy is it to miss the people who awaken each day not in safety but in fear for their lives? While we fear violence ourselves from terrorists, are we missing the “slow-motion violence” of economic injustice that visits injury, pain, loneliness and hunger upon those who suffer the effects of greed and negligence, day in and day out? What is the deepest longing of our hearts this Advent, and are those longings in line with the longings of the heart of God?

May you have a blessed Advent.

Readings Meditation Continued…

We ourselves read of these promises as people longing for the return of Jesus, our righteous Branch, the one who preached justice and embodied righteousness. One of the liturgical touches of great beauty during this season is the lighting of candles, usually associated with a different theme each week. These themes may put us even more deeply in the “mood” of Christmas, that is, if we miss the thread of judgment that runs through these prophetic readings as well. As Deborah A. Block observes, “The church may light its Advent candles for preparation, hope, joy and love, but the prophets sound justice and righteousness”. We do prefer to hear of grace and peace rather than judgment, of course, but if there is never judgment, why would anything we do, matter? The rightness and wrongness, the good and the evil content of our lives and our choices give them moral weight, and cause our lives to matter even more. And our accumulated choices, the little ones as well as the big ones, shape our communities into centers of greed and self-interest, or into radiant centers of hope and love and peace…more tomorrow.

Father God, there stands in the wings of our courts, congressional halls and Oval Office those who would bend the ear of those who represent us. They offer advice and counsel so that decisions can be made. Free them of bias that they may give advice that is competent, accurate and needed. Let them feel the weight of the decisions they help to form. Amen.

Readings Meditation Continued…

This day promised by God will, however, be a day of justice, when the cities–the cities of ancient Israel and of modern Israel as well, the cities of our own nation, not just New York City and Washington D.C. and New Orleans, but Cleveland and Detroit and St. Louis, too–will not be ruined, and “the land” will not be scarred by poverty and violence and greed. A day is surely coming, the prophet says, when all of God’s children will live in peace. Everyone will have enough to eat, shelter and safety, the goods of life provided so generously by a loving God. The one who is yet to come, the one we await, will bring this justice and righteousness, and we order our lives differently today as we wait and hope.

So we begin the season of Advent with this reading from a time long ago, when a king in the line of the great King David was the hope of the people of Israel. It seems that the promises God is going to fulfill are as this-worldly as next-worldly, and the promise of a “Branch” that will “spring up for David” indicates that leadership is very important if human beings are going to participate in this great day. Gene M. Tucker notes that this promised one, like God, will focus on the justice of our “governmental, political concerns, both domestic and foreign,” and he calls this “not just an ancient Israelite hope, but the Christian expectation at Advent as well” …more tomorrow.

Wednesday’s Scriptural Reading

1 Thessalonians 3:9-13 (HCSB)
9 How can we thank God for you in return for all the joy we experience because of you before our God,
10 as we pray earnestly night and day to see you face to face and to complete what is lacking in your faith?
11 Now may our God and Father Himself, and our Lord Jesus, direct our way to you.
12 And may the Lord cause you to increase and overflow with love for one another and for everyone, just as we also do for you.
13 May He make your hearts blameless in holiness before our God and Father at the coming of our Lord Jesus with all His saints. Amen.

Readings Mediation Continued…

It is right then, right there, in the midst of despair, that the prophet arises, the prophet who is also a poet with an imagination and a deep sense of call to proclaim, even in desolation, destruction, and loss, the promise of God’s future taking shape beneath and behind it all. What is happening underneath, what we cannot see, is nevertheless real. Now, in the midst of the terrible suffering of the people, with Jerusalem destroyed and the temple in ruins, Jeremiah doesn’t heap more misery on the people but instead offers them something to grasp, a hope to which they can cling. In fact, the prophet’s voice takes such a dramatic turn that these chapters of Jeremiah are called the Book of Consolation, or the Book of Comfort.

The people need this consolation: if they had had mental health professionals in those days, they would have been inundated by people suffering from depression and perhaps even post-traumatic stress disorder. In any age and any situation of great suffering, depression is a hazard for those whose pain and loss are so great that they cannot imagine a future. Why look to the future, they might ask, if life holds the potential for so much pain? And yet, in the midst of communal depression, the prophet speaks a word of hope, a promise of what is yet to be. Jeremiah doesn’t say that things might get better, or could be better, or that we should be optimistic about future possibilities. The prophet says that “the days are surely coming”–and you can count on it because God is the one making this promise.

What will this day look like? It will not be a day of revenge so those who are suffering can turn around and do damage to their own victims. Some of us remember Robert F. Kennedy speaking to a crowd in Indianapolis the night that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was shot. He had to share this terrible news with the stunned and anguished crowd, and it is believed that his words helped to keep a level of calm in that city while others went up in flames. He spoke against the division, the hatred, the violence and lawlessness that had the power to tear our nation apart in those turbulent times, recalling that he had lost a member of his own family to such violence and hatred. And then he lifted up instead “love and wisdom and compassion toward one another. A feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country.”…more tomorrow.

Reading Meditations

Whether we saw them with our own eyes or only on our television screens, it is certainly true that those images are hard to forget: the smoking rubble of the World Trade Center, a jagged scar on the earth in Eastern Pennsylvania, a gaping hole in the side of a burning Pentagon. Few of us had ever seen a great city in ruin, set afire by those who wanted to obliterate it. Other nations and their children have long known bombings and rubble, but this was the first time we in the United States saw our major cities under attack, with staggering destruction and loss of life; we have all felt less safe since September 11, 2001. It would be reasonable to say that our nation sustained a spiritual wound just as much as a physical one on that day, eleven years ago.

Perhaps then we can just begin to imagine how the people of Israel felt so long ago, when their city, their nation, was destroyed and their rulers and religious leaders carried off to a distant land. Our lectionary reading for this first Sunday of a new Church Year, the First Sunday of Advent, is from the book of the prophet Jeremiah. Six hundred years before Jesus was born, the people of Israel were carried off to exile in Babylon, after many warnings by the prophets, including Jeremiah, that their failure to live faithfully, to live in justice and righteousness, would bring their downfall. They must have felt that they had been cut down, like a tree felled by the ax of a brutal and heartless oppressor. Once, under the great King David, Israel had been a formidable political and military power, and its people still remembered those glory days and longed for their return. Now, their king was no more, that glory was only a dim memory, and their hopes were dashed upon the rocks of the brutal history of empire…more tomorrow.

Lord of Wisdom, speak to those who reside in our congressional halls and debate the fiscal future of our country. Open their eyes beyond partisan allegiances to see the people who elected them and their need. Grant courage where necessary. Silence the voices that offer only contention. And raise up those noble few who will do that which protects and preserves this land we love. In your grace, we ask it. Amen.

Weekly Prayer

O God of all the prophets, you herald the coming of the Son of Man by wondrous signs in the heavens and on the earth. Guard our hearts from despair so that we, in the company of the faithful and by the power of your Holy Spirit, may be found ready to raise our heads at the coming near of our redemption, the day of Jesus Christ. Amen.

Monday’s Scripture

Jeremiah 33:14-16 (HCSB)
14 “Look, the days are coming”—[this is] the Lord’s declaration—“when I will fulfill the good promises that I have spoken concerning the house of Israel and the house of Judah.
15 In those days and at that time I will cause a Branch of righteousness to sprout up for David, and He will administer justice and righteousness in the land.
16 In those days Judah will be saved, and Jerusalem will dwell securely, and this is what she will be named: The Lord Is Our Righteousness.